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It's hard to avoid hearing about influenza virus these days. In all the noise, it's tough to sort out the facts from the rumors and conspiracy theories. I've already discussed a bit about the basic biology of the virus in this post, so I'm not going to review that here (though a good overview can…

Though there still may be some lingering doubt about the cause of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, the pathogen behind the outbreaks that have taken place in the last 150 years or so is much less ambiguous.
While Koch and Pasteur ushered in the golden age of microbiology, an…

Regular readers don't need to be told that I'm a bit obsessed with zoonotic disease. It's what I study, and it's a big part of what I teach. I run a Center devoted to the investigation of emerging diseases, and the vast majority of all emerging diseases are zoonotic. I have an ongoing series of…

I write a lot on here about evolution, and more about epidemiology. A recent article in Emerging Infectious Diseases discusses a unique combination of the two: 2,500-year Evolution of the Term Epidemic. I've said before that I'm about the farthest thing from a language scholar you can find, but…

Tara, it's been ten years since I read Paul Ewald's "Evolution of Infectious Diseases" and I'm curious about the current thinking about emerging infectious diseases in that context.

I'm aware that both of the main hypothesis that Ewald puts forward in this context — the 1918 flu pandemic and HIV — have been disproven. This is damaging to Ewald's argument, of course, but it's also perhaps unfortunate that he went out on a limb, given that the essential argument — pathogens will evolve toward increasing virulence under certain conditions — seems to be moderately well-established in more narrow contexts.

So the consensus was, and remains, that highly virulent pathogens and the occasional resulting pandemics are generally zoonotic. But it's still possible, isn't it, that an endemic pathogen could take a strong turn toward virulence if the ecological conditions were dramatically altered — specifically, that a reliance upon an ambulatory, less-virulent direct contagion would be superceded by a new external vector, lessening the selection against virulence?

Is there new, important work in the evolution of pathogens, or has this (the work of Ewald's et alia) been refuted or just dormant?

I'm also a bit rusty in this area, but at least since the last time I looked into it maybe a year ago, I think largely just dormant. Unfortunately there seem to be many exceptions to the "rules" Ewald put forth, so it's been difficult to really pin down general trends in the evolution of virulence. I like his underlying ideas and they seem to make sense, but biology is just so messy it seems that for every "rhinovirus evolves to avirulence" you get a "yeah, except in this case..." scenario.

Thanks. I'm just an (informed) layperson, but I was very impressed with Ewald's book and I agree with you that his ideas make a lot of sense. The two different directions — epidemiology and clinical evolutionary medicine — both seemed to me to be full of promise, accounting for something that had in the past been overlooked and which can sometimes be of crucial importance. The case studies he presents about the neonatal units still loom large in my mind, ten years since I read the book.

Tara - I posted this to Orac, to get some scientists involved in the question. Maybe I'm misreading it, although the comments seem to make my reading sure, but people seem to be arguing that it is better for HIV+ people to conceal their condition and have unprotected sex then for them to reveal it and possibly suffer prejudice or discrimination. That's how a lot of us read it, but it would be nice to hear the perspective of someone who is familiar with infectious diseases.

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As several others have already noted, after almost 12 years, Scienceblogs is shutting down at month's end. Though I've done most of my writing elsewhere over the last few years, I'd certainly like to keep the archives of this blog up somewhere, and maintain it as a place to post random musings that…

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HIV's Patient Zero Exonerated
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If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the…

Before you ask yourself, "what kind of incendiary title is that," let me put this in perspective. In 2001, I started graduate school at the University of Florida, and in 2002, I took one of the most difficult year-long courses a physics student can take: Quantum Field Theory. This was both the best and worst course I've ever taken. I worked harder for it than I ever have for any other course, I…